Psychology
Joan Roughgarden has responded to my comment about her recent KQED radio appearance. Her response includes this:
Today, in 2007 only a few, like Roberts, still take Bailey’s work seriously.
In 2006, Bailey’s work was featured on 60 Minutes in a piece titled “The Science of Sexual Orientation.” After the piece aired, a blogger criticized Bailey. Shari Finkelstein,the producer, responded:
His work is highly regarded by all of the researchers in the field who we spoke with.
What a difference a year makes, if Roughgarden is correct.
Health food is extremely popular in America yet obesity levels continue to rise. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research explains that paradox.
It turns out that when consumers see a healthy choice, be it drinks, deserts or food, they end up consuming 131% more calories.
“In our black and white view, most food is good or not good,” explain Pierre Chandon (INSEAD, France) and Brian Wansink (Cornell University). “When we see a fast-food restaurant like Subway advertising its low-calorie sandwiches, we think, ‘It’s OK: I can eat a sandwich there and then have a high-calorie dessert,’…
Do you remember exactly where you were when you learned of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? Your answer is probably yes, and researchers are beginning to understand why we remember events that carry negative emotional weight.
Boston College psychologist Elizabeth Kensinger and colleagues explain when emotion is likely to reduce our memory inconsistencies.
Her research shows that whether an event is pleasurable or aversive seems to be a critical determinant of the accuracy with which the event is remembered, with negative events being remembered in greater detail than positive ones.
For…
Two days ago, the KQED radio program Forum with Michael Krasny discussed the attacks on Northwestern psychology professor Michael Bailey and his book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Here is their webpage.
Joan Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford, was one of the guests. After Bailey gave a talk at Stanford in 2003, Roughgarden wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper that contained the following sentence:
To many observers, Bailey appears to be a rather dumb, stubborn, dense and possibly deceptive regular guy with some experience in locker-room humor.
This sort of comment would go…
A situation in which wages increase 2.3% and prices increase 3.1% is equivalent to a situation in which wages fall by 0.8% at constant prices. Though the two scenarios are equivalent in real terms there are people who perceive these situations differently. These people are said to be prone to 'money illusion.'
It has been commonly thought that the impact of irrational behavior is limited in markets because “smart agents” can take advantage of irrational traders. However, recent evidence from the field and the experimental laboratory suggests that money illusion is not limited.
A rational…
I did this experiment yesterday. It took the whole day but the results were clear by noon.
At about 7 am I took 4 tablespoons of flaxseed oil (Spectrum Organic). I measured my mental function with a letter-counting test. Here is what happened.
My reaction times decreased 2-3 hours after drinking the flaxseed oil. Over the next 6-8 hours they returned to baseline.
For cognoscenti, here are the accuracy data:
Accuracy was fairly constant.
These results resemble earlier time-course measurements (here and here). What pleases me so much is not the confirmation — after the earlier two results I…
Few people have used the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet more successfully than Tim Beneke, an Oakland journalist. I put before and after photos of him — before and after he lost about 100 pounds — on the front page of the proposal for The Shangri-La Diet. He writes:
It’s very clear to me this summer that it’s much easier for me to go tasteless and only consume the mush if I don’t go to Berkeley, and just stay home in my apartment (except going for my neighborhood walk). And it’s not merely a matter of behavior. When I go to Berkeley and walk near places where I am accustomed to eating (and…
Without the heartbreak of ended relationships, half of popular music would cease to exist. Everyone has had one but it turns out it probably wasn't so bad - especially if you thought it would be horrible.
A new Northwestern University study shows that lovers, even those madly in love, do much better following a breakup than they imagined they would.
In other words, participants who forecast how badly they would feel over a breakup with a partner actually felt much less distress than they had predicted in the days prior to the relationship’s demise.
Though the love-crazed participants may…
Are too many people now diagnosed as having depression? Two experts give their views.
Professor Gordon Parker, a psychiatrist from Australia says the current threshold for what is considered to be ‘clinical depression’ is too low. He fears it could lead to a diagnosis of depression becoming less credible.
It is, he says, normal to be depressed and points to his own cohort study which followed 242 teachers. Fifteen years into the study, 79% of respondents had already met the symptom and duration criteria for major, minor or sub-syndromal depression.
He blames the over-diagnosis of clinical…
An unusual investigation was recently carried out by researchers under the guidance of Tatiana Rebeko, Ph.D. at the Institute of Psychology, Russian Academy of Sciences. Their interest was beauty aids and what it could tell them about personality strains.
They determined that the types of beauty creams a woman uses can provide insight about how their owner copes with stresses, finds the way out of conflict situations and also about the person’s self-appraisal. The researchers call it the “structure of feminine identity.”
The investigation involved 28 women, ages 22 to 65 and the…